Moby-Duck (29 page)

Two photographs in
Archipelago
are on their way to becoming environmental icons. The first shows the necropsied cadaver of a six-month-old Laysan albatross named Shed Bird from whose downy breast spills a slimy casserole of bottle caps and cigarette lighters and unidentifiable plastic shards. The second is the one Ebbesmeyer showed me in Sitka, of the contents of that slimy casserole, arranged, carefully, artfully, onto the photographers' white backdrop—a “mosaic of death,” the caption in their book calls it.

National Geographic
published the two pictures of Shed Bird in 2005, and Greenpeace has since used them in an ad campaign captioned with the slogan “How to starve to death on a full stomach.” Shed Bird is now a poster child, and it's easy to see why. The images are not merely powerful, or shocking; they're persuasively accusatory. It's as though the photographers had sailed off into the mists of our collective obliviousness and returned with forensic evidence. Look, dear consumer, these two pictures seem to say; look at what you've done, look where what you throw away ends up. Or as Charlie Moore likes to say, “There is no ‘away.' The ocean is away.” Shed Bird is away.

Nearly everyone I've asked about the impact of plastics pollution—oceanographers, environmentalists, policy makers, plastics executives—invokes these images of ornithological death-by-plastic. “You've seen the pictures of the seabirds?” Pallister had asked me while we were towing the
Opus
down to Resurrection Bay. Several months before, after taking a tour of the Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago, First Lady Laura Bush had been asked the same question by a reporter for the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
: “You've seen the picture of what came out of one little bird?”

“That's one bird from Susan Middleton's book,” Laura Bush replied.

When I spoke to Benjamin Grumbles, an assistant administrator in the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Water, he mentioned the First Lady's concern for those “ocean birds dying or having died because they were eating some toys or other types of plastics.”

“We've all seen the pictures of the impacts on sea life,” said Sharon Kneiss, vice president of the products division of the American Chemistry Council. “You can't help but be moved with concern. We're citizens of the world, too. We don't want to see that happen.”

The story goes that the First Lady took up the cause of marine conservation after seeing Liittschwager and Middleton's photographs, and then persuaded her husband to take it up as well. In 2006, President Bush designated the entire Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago and the surrounding 137,797 square miles of ocean a marine national monument, the highest level of environmental protection that the federal government can bestow. Next to no commercial activities are permitted within the monument's bounds, not even tourism. You can only visit the place with government permission, and even then, to prevent bringing invasive stowaways with you, you must wear brand-new clothing that has been frozen for at least forty-eight hours. “For seabirds and sea life, this unique region will be a sanctuary for them to grow and to thrive,” Bush said at the signing ceremony. Waxing ecological about “the destructive effects of abandoned nets and other debris,” he called for “robust efforts to prevent this kind of debris from polluting our—polluting this sanctuary, this monument.”

Most environmental groups applauded the designation. Nevertheless, having watched the Bush administration roll out cynically titled policies like the Clear Skies Initiative, which in fact weakened emission controls, or the Healthy Forests Initiative, which gave the logging industry more access to national forests, Jon Coifman, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, was wary of the administration's motives. “In the rare instances when they've done the right thing, it's because the political cost has been nil,” Coifman told me. “There was no one fat and happy on the other side of it who had an obvious interest at stake.” Designating the monument was, in Coifman's opinion, such an instance. After all, the territory is largely uninhabited, and the only people whose economic interests will suffer from the designation are a handful of unlucky fishermen. Still, even if the designation were politically expedient, who could complain? Said Coifman: “Whatever motive brings somebody to the table to do something good on the environment, big or small, terrific, welcome aboard, we need all the help we can get.” This would be the largest marine park in the world, after all, home to some seven thousand species, some of them, like the monk seal, seriously endangered, and the Laysan albatross, seriously threatened—though less threatened than when feathered hats were in fashion. As for the former president's idyll of thriving and growing seabirds, and Greenpeace's ad campaign (what unlikely allies!), there was, I learned a few days after disembarking from the
Alguita
, one small problem.

I went to Honolulu to meet with scientists who possessed firsthand knowledge of the Garbage Patch, hoping to learn whether or not they concurred with Moore's findings and shared his alarm. Beth Flint's reaction was fairly typical. A biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Flint has been for many years the person in charge of protecting the threatened seabirds of the Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago. “I suspect that you've seen some of those photos of the dead ones with all of the plastic in their guts,” she told me one morning in the conference room of a federal office building. “We find that when we take people up to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, the debris is the most compelling thing they see—sometimes to the exclusion of everything else. They can't tear their eyes away from it or think about any of the other issues because it's so disturbing to them.”

To her it was disturbing too, but ambiguous. Wildlife biologists don't know for certain that plastic killed the albatross. The pathology is unclear. Did sharp shards perforate the intestines of fledglings? Sometimes. Did it obstruct the digestive tract or make a bird “starve to death on a full stomach,” as the Greenpeace campaign put it? Possibly. On the other hand, Flint speculated, albatrosses eat squid, and chitinous squid beaks are also impossible to digest. Furthermore, Flint, who clearly respects the animals she studies, is tired of reading that albatrosses mistake plastic for food. “That's always the assumption: those stupid birds, they can't tell a ham sandwich from a plastic bottle cap.” In fact, adult albatrosses seek out floating plastics because nutritious treats like barnacles tend to grow on them.

Despite these caveats, Flint still believed that all that plastic in the albatross diet was “clearly not good for them.” Were the toxins in and on plastics getting into the food chain? According to Flint, studies have confirmed that long-lived seabirds like albatrosses have “high contaminant burdens,” and they also have “plastic in their guts in pretty prodigious amounts,” but “it's still all sort of circumstantial,” Flint said, and the greater dangers may be the invisible ones.

The greatest known threat to the albatross is commercial fishing. Adult birds will swoop down for a morsel and end up as “bycatch” on a longliner's fishing hook. Or in the trawl fishery, said Flint, they'll “collide with the third wire, the thing holding the trawl, and break their wings and die.” And if even one of its parents dies, a hungry fledgling back in the rookery will likely starve. Then there's the golden crownbeard, an invasive plant that “displaces everything in its path,” and “becomes this impenetrable thicket so that birds can't even get into their nests, and if they do manage to raise a chick, the chick is surrounded by thick, thick vegetation that cuts off the breeze.” Chicks overheat, dehydrate, and die, and “having a big gutful of plastic” probably makes dehydration all the more likely. So does global warming. Finally there's the lead paint flaking off the derelict military compound at Midway, which it would take around $6 million to clean up—considerably less than we're spending on marine debris. Listening to Flint catalog the plague of perils that face the Laysan albatross even there in that sanctuary where seabirds are supposed to thrive and grow, I was overcome by a sense of gloomy futility. Why bother with beach cleanups, or anti-littering campaigns, or plastic-bag bans, or bottle deposits, or any of the “robust efforts against marine debris” that we could possibly make? At least the future of the Laysan albatross wasn't as dim as that of the Laysan duck, of which there are now only around 465 left; of Laysan albatrosses, by contrast, there remain 2.4 million.

Confusingly, despite her litany of caveats, Flint's praise for Moore was unequivocal: “I think that he's done a tremendously valuable service to humanity by pursuing this when none of the big oceanographic or academic institutions or government institutions did,” Flint said. She predicted that other researchers would soon “get on his bandwagon.” Her prediction seems to be coming true. In the last few years several studies of plastic poisoning have appeared in reputable journals.

The hardest question to answer about the Garbage Patch, it turns out, isn't whether plastic debris threatens animals and ecosystems, but what if anything can be done about it. “We haven't been able to hatch up any good ideas,” Flint admitted. Albatross fledglings don't forage on land, she explained. In fact they don't forage at all. Their parents do, flying far and wide across the Pacific, swooping down to skim morsels off the surface, which they bring back home and regurgitate into a hungry fledgling's mouth. That's where all the detritus in that Greenpeace ad came from. Even if we were to clean every beach in the world, it wouldn't keep albatrosses from stuffing their offspring full of plastic. “You'd have to clean the entire ocean,” Flint said.

 

 

Back on the
Alguita
, I'd described for Charlie Moore the tonnage of debris I'd witnessed on Gore Point. “That's not unusual,” he'd said. “I have pictures of Japan, where that's the case. I've got pictures of Hawaii where that's the case. Any windward side of an island's going to have situations like that. The question is, How much can we take? We're burying ourselves in this stuff.” Moore sympathized with Pallister's motives, and believed that GoAK's efforts might help “raise awareness.” But he also agreed with Bob Shavelson that cleanups alone serve little purpose. If Pallister thought he was saving Gore Point from plastic pollution he was fooling himself. “It's just going to come back.”

Evidence I'd collected on the day of the airlift lent credence to this prediction. Before I boarded the helicopter and began my long journey home, I'd hurried across the isthmus for one last solitary walk along the windward shore. At the strand line I'd found the day's deposit: toothbrush, Clorox bottle, surfboard fin, capless deodorant stick, sixteen water bottles, all Asian in origin. This, in Moore's opinion, is why the 2006 Marine Debris, Research Prevention, and Reduction Act is likewise doomed to fail. “It's all been focused on cleanups,” he said of the action the federal government had taken. “They think if they take tonnage out of the water, the problem will go away.”

Moore is right in this respect: current federal policy does treat symptoms more than causes. In the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, whose shores are washed by the southern edge of the Garbage Patch, federal agencies are staging one of the biggest marine-debris projects in history. Since 1996, using computer models, satellite data, and aerial surveys, NOAA, the Coast Guard, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have located and removed more than five hundred metric tons of derelict fishing gear in hopes of saving the endangered Hawaiian monk seal from entanglement. Administrators at NOA A's Marine Debris Program point to the project as an example of success, but the results, vindicating Moore, have been mixed at best. NOAA incinerates the debris it collects at a power plant on the outskirts of Honolulu, converting it into electricity. But unless they're supplemented by a metropolitan supply of garbage, such incinerators operate at a loss, and in places that cannot support them, like maritime Alaska, the only option is to bury debris in landfills, and in many coastal communities, landfill space is already running short. Furthermore, although wildlife biologists are now finding fewer monk seals entangled in debris, they are also finding fewer monk seals, period.
²⁰

In some respects, however, Moore's indictment of the Marine Debris Program is not entirely just: NOAA isn't focusing only on cleanups. The agency is also investing in educational programs to teach litter prevention to both beachgoers and fisherfolk. And NOAA scientists known as “net nerds” are submitting derelict gear to the sort of rigorous scrutiny to which archaeologists submit arrowheads and potsherds. Although it's not a job I'd want, the expertise of net nerds, and the Siddharthan reserves of patience and attention they surely must possess, does command a kind of admiration. From the colors of the fibers and the size and style of the weave, net nerds can distinguish old nets from new ones, American nets from Indonesian ones. Toward what end all this taxonomizing? To hold the guilty parties accountable and persuade them to change their ways.

Then, too, the NOAA scientists I spoke to in Honolulu do not believe that cleanups alone will make marine debris go away. In removing debris from the water column, they merely hope to spare as many animals as possible—sea turtles, seabirds, whales, monk seals—from the tortures, often fatal, inflicted by a ghost net or plastic bag. “If animals do get entangled in gear and they aren't able to get out of it, it's a very slow, rather painful death,” a freckle-faced, black-haired NOAA cetologist of mixed Scottish-Japanese descent told me. Her name was Naomi McIntosh. Consider what happens to a juvenile humpback with a loop of netting snared around its fin: As the whale grows, the nylon line will carve through flesh and bone until the animal dies—slowly, painfully—from its infected wounds. “With animals that are entangled, you can see the weight loss, their bones coming through. When we see animals that have been entangled for a long time there are parasites,” McIntosh said.